AI's Social Forcefield: Reshaping Distributed Cognition in Human-AI Teams

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17489v2
• Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:09:59 GMT
• Title: AI's Social Forcefield: Reshaping Distributed Cognition in Human-AI Teams
• Authors: Christoph Riedl, Saiph Savage, Josie Zvelebilova,
• Abstract summary: We show that AI actively reshapes the social and cognitive fabric of collaboration.<n>We show that AI participation reorganizes the distributed cognitive architecture of teams.<n>We argue for rethinking AI in teams as a socially influential actor.
• Score: 6.386909552513031
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: AI is not only a neutral tool in team settings; it actively reshapes the social and cognitive fabric of collaboration. We advance a unified framework of alignment in distributed cognition in human-AI teams -- a process through which linguistic, cognitive, and social coordination emerge as human and AI agents co-construct a shared representational space. Across two studies, we show that exposure to AI-generated language shapes not only how people speak, but also how they think, what they attend to, and how they relate to each other. Together, these findings reveal how AI participation reorganizes the distributed cognitive architecture of teams: AI systems function as implicit social forcefields. Our findings highlight the double-edged impact of AI: the same mechanisms that enable efficient collaboration can also erode epistemic diversity and undermine natural alignment processes. We argue for rethinking AI in teams as a socially influential actor and call for new design paradigms that foreground transparency, controllability, and group-level dynamics to foster responsible, productive human-AI collaboration.

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